ARAMASA SAKURA

Introductory note by Sandra S.Phillips

000-Kyoto

ARAMASA SAKURA in black box

These beautiful pictures of blossoming cherry trees by Taku Aramasa
are wonderfully fresh and inventive. To those of us who admire
Japanese culture but who live outside it these photographs also
represent something we recognize as "Japanese."They are gorgeous,
exuberant but also fragile and thus a little sad. It is important that the subject is
the cherry blossom, for admiring these blossoms is a national obsession. In Japan,
every year at the expected time, maps are printed in newspapers, and discussion
occurs on the weather stations of the national television channels about when the
optimum moment for viewing these flowers is projected, as the blooms open
earlier in the southern part of the country and gradually proceed northwards.

During the last period of military expansion from the 1930's and ending,
terribly in 1945, the ruling powers in Japan politicized the ancient Shinto practice.
TheYasukuni shrine in Tokyo, mostly identified with the last World War, is essentially a monument to those soldiers who died for the country's military ambitions.
The cherry trees at Yasukuni are numerous and graceful, and symbolize the brief
but beautiful life of those young soldiers who died in the service of their country's
dreams of power. Since the war, and certainly before it, the fragile and fleeting
cherry blossom has been identified with Japanese culture in a larger sense; it
reflects a cult of the beautiful, and a profound belief in nature as a relief from and
explanation of complex change.

Aramasa's pictures are made with a pinhole lens, that is, they are made with a
tiny spot of light that enters the camera through a small hole, not a normal lens.
This is the most basic, the most essential camera image and the phenomenon that
led to the optical and chemical advances of modern photography. The ancients
knew that a speck of light entering a dark room would render a vision of the
scene outside on the opposite wall the shadowy figures of Plato's cave may be
such a description. This primitive methodology, however, has been used by a
sophisticated artist, one who appreciates and emphasizes the inherent spatial
distortions and the particularly crepuscular light such a lens provides. These
qualities impart a sense of the magic, the spectral, even the ancient. They are also
entirely, wonderfully unique.

000-Kyoto

ARAMASA SAKURA in black room

Aramasa is a talented and knowing artist, whose main interest in photography
has been to understand modern Japan as a country and a culture. Earlier, he
photographed Japanese immigration: to China, to South America and to the
United States. His pictures of the deserted internment camps where Japanese
Americans lived through the past World War are photographs of great integrity
and humanity. More recently he has made pictures examining the Japanese
shoreline. These pictures of the ancient ritual of the Japanese: looking at and
admiring the annual display nature provides, are another form of inquiry into
Japanese culture, ancient and modern.

Sandra S, Phillips is
the Senior Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.